


even something as green as envy can bloom into beauty

by yosjiefo



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, it gets like Slightly Spicy but not really, saimatsu is brought up in discussion but never really to fruition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 20:27:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12307113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yosjiefo/pseuds/yosjiefo
Summary: [ V3 Spoilers up to CH3 end ]Saihara loves Iruma; she wants a mark to prove it.





	even something as green as envy can bloom into beauty

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I play the localized version of the game, so I'll be using the localized names in narration. However, I do try to use the Japanese honorifics in the dialogue, and I apologize if I messed those up simply because I've never played a fantranslation or a Japanese copy.
> 
> This assumes Shuichi has completed all of Miu's FTEs by chapter 3, though this takes place in chapter 4.

“Long time no see, Suckhara! Couldn’t get enough of me, huh? Not that I blame you. I mean, what kinda guy would be able to keep their eyes offa me for long?”

Though Shuichi rolled his eyes, a smile graced his features as he made some space for himself in the inventor’s talent lab by standing idly by the bed in the center. He had made himself more and more a frequent guest in her newfound workplace in recent days, so much so that Miu had begun to be able to distinguish his footsteps when he entered. Even still, he could never stop announcing his presence just as he steps in.

A quiet, polite “ _It’s me,_ ” contrasting heavily with Miu’s vibrant and…  _colorful_  own response peppered their newly established routine. It was an amazing curiosity that the two ended up this way, this close, and it displayed just with those few daily few seconds.

“But… I saw you yesterday, Iruma-san...”

“Huh? Was it yesterday? Guess that just shows how thirsty you are!”

Her laugh was once crude— actually, truth be told, it kind of still was, but there was a melody to them now. Through time, as brief as it may be, he had uncovered the sparkling diamond quality; and with it, a new weakness. His teeth peeked through his lips as he listened. Though the inventor’s chortle was fleeting, the effect it left lingered upon the detective’s countenance.

“Yeah... before you left for the Computer Room, remember?” he brought up.

“Damn, are you SURE that was yesterday?” She stopped her work at the table and turned around to face him, leaning forward with an accusing finger though her expression held no malice— merely that her eyes sought out confirmation. “That could’ve been any day!”

The question gave him pause. It was very possible that he had misremembered it, but… “No, I’m positive… I spent time with you and then later Shirogane-san. Speaking of which, what  _have_  you been doing up there? You seem to visit it every night and… well…”

Miu leaned back, standing tall again with a hand on her hip. “Well…?”

“.........”

“Oh! I bet I figured it out already. You missed me, didn’t ya?! Was feelin’ a li’l blue balled cause your favorite girl genius was paying more attention to a slick-ass computer, huh?” She began to erupt with laughter again at her own dirty joke, but then something was off.

He was keeping quiet.

His gaze was averted and it looked as if he were bringing up a hand to lower the brim of a cap that was no longer there. On top of that, an embarrassed shade of pink dusted his cheeks. When his fingers found no brim to latch onto, he clasped his hand over top of his mouth instead.

“Holy shit.”

“...What?” he eventually said, letting his hand drop to his side again.

As his eyes moved to try and look her in the eye, he couldn’t help but notice the slight tremble in her shoulders. What came out of her lips was not her usual loud subverted cacophony but instead a rather light, airy giggle. The foreign sound struck him where he stood so much so that he at first had no idea what to say, and when the words came to him, nary another thought filtered it: “That was… surprisingly girlish of you.”

“Eh?” Miu paused. The innocent bliss that had painted her countenance changed to confusion. “What do you mean? Case you forgot, you ARE dating a dickless pair of legs!”

The way she had to describe things… Though once it merely caused him to grimace, it was somewhat endearing in its own way— if not for any reason other than the fact he had become used to it in the short time that was the blooming of their whirlwind romance. “I don’t know how to say it…”

“Well, don’t you fucking give up just because of that!”

“...You’re cute.”

“Huu…?!”

The surprised sound she emitted cast worry into his heart; it was the noise she had so often used when someone scolded her or otherwise backed her into a corner after she had taken it one step too far. He was fearful, and the inexperienced blush upon his cheeks faded as he started to try and make amends: “L-Listen, I didn’t—”

“...C-Can you say it again?”

He merely stared at her for a few moments in disbelief. She continued to look meek with her composure as her fingers toyed with strands of her hair. It was if his face had given up its scarlet heat for hers, the way she was flushed before him now.

How devastating of a look, really.

“Um… you’re cute…?”

“D-Don’t say it so… so unsure of yourself so sudden…! What’s the big deal?! What do I gotta do?!”

“You don’t have to do anything…?” He searched her eyes for some kind of truth they might hold for her insecurity, something he hadn’t strongly associated with her, until an intrusive thought entered his mind. “Um… Iruma-san… Are you worried about something?”

“Whaddaya mean by that, huh?!”

“W-Well… I don’t know… You kind of seemed… upset with me— I guess?— during the investigation for the previous murder.”

“You’re reading WAY too much into that, Suckhara! So what even if I  _was_  upset— which I TOTALLY wasn’t, by the way— it wouldn’t have been for you!”

Yikes, that hurt.

“Well… I guess you’re right, that it could have been because it was a murder scene,” Shuichi attempted to gather all his deductions to make a coherent rebuttal, “but you weren’t that close to the victim were you? You didn’t join the cult, so it seems improbable to me that you were mourning her…”

“Wow, you just wanna make me out to sound like some kinda heartless bitch, huh?”

“N-No! That’s not it at all! I’m just thinking… there was definitely something there that put you in a bad mood. Can you… let me guess, at least?”

“...Fine. Tell me with your brilliant mind, Suckhara: What made the great Miu Iruma upset? HYPOTHETICALLY, of course.”

“Was it… the effigy of Akamatsu-san?”

“Wouldn’t that just make YOU the cryin’ heap here, boy? Puh-lease!”

“No, no, I’m certain it was that,” he pushed forward. “Even if it wasn’t, you didn’t have to say that Akamatsu-san was my girlfriend. I know Harukawa-san was there next to me, but… that only meant you had to hide that we were dating, not that…”

“...A-Are you mad at me?”

Was he mad at her? The idea to be angry hadn’t crossed his mind, so the suggestion that he should have been baffled him into silence, silence that seemed to only be taken the wrong way by the inventor.

“I knew it…! You were upset with me!”

“No, I’m not upset… I just want to know why you had said it. Were you…?”

The words became caught in his throat. Neither party wanted to come out and say it, so an uncomfortable lull filled between them as they stared at one another, wavered, but then came back to look each other in the eye expectantly. Shuichi knew it was his role still to finish his statement, but the accusation seemed too heavy to be comfortable and if he had been wrong, the entire ordeal would have just been him wasting her time and making her fearful for nothing.

The first one to break the silence was Miu. “I was just thinkin’ that… well… You totally had the hots for pig-tits, and I’d completely forgotten that until that shitty cult leader had to up and go make a freaky wax version of her. I figured, y’know, maybe seeing her with a big, long thing impaled through her might’ve, I dunno, given you some latent thoughts you’d buried deep! Things you totally forgot about after starting to see me but then BAM! —Akamatsu has to come in and steal the show again!”

...He sincerely hoped she wasn’t trying to imply that she seriously thought he was having dirty thoughts upon landing his eyes on the sight of a wax replica of a corpse. Half of him wanted to believe all the vulgar things she said were just in jest, but then the other half of him remembered that it was the inventor that had so lovingly gifted him a box of things to help him masturbate with.

“I mean… I was sad remembering remembering her again, yes, but… That doesn’t change what’s in the present.”

Still, it seemed as if Miu wasn’t as convinced by his pretty words as he might have hoped she would be. “Y’sure, punk?! I mean, if you can only get off to busty blonde beauties with pink outfits, that sure as hell narrows down the list of choices for you here, huh?!”

This… was going nowhere.

With a sigh, Shuichi stepped forward and tilted his head, angling himself as he leaned forward and placed a rather chaste kiss upon the inventor’s lips. Though he had intended it to merely be a long peck, he could feel Miu’s hands grasp at the front of his uniform’s jacket, pleading him with her force to stay there with her. His eyes had snapped open at first in surprise but he quickly acquiesced to her. After all, it was in this exchange that he had hoped he might be able to convince her of his feelings in the way his words were failing him.

She began to nibble at his lower lip. Whilst he had been the one to initiate the kiss, it was her who had quickly taken the reins and lead it. She quickly tried to rush it, ghosting a line across the folds of his lips with her tongue. The sudden feeling of her parted his lips in surprise and she took that opening to thrust into his mouth, searching for him.

There was a strange timidness despite the rapid speed she was trying to progress things as if she had no idea what she were doing. Though she had found his tongue, it was him who had to really respond to keep things moving along. She replied eagerly to this, a glee conveyed that he was happy enough to receive. Her hands moved to guide his own, bringing one to her waist. When he figured out her aim, he moved his other hand to the other side of her hips.

Perhaps with this new positioning with him leaning forcefully into her and her bringing her hands back to their previous location to pull him even closer to her, they had crashed into the work table that Miu had been standing idly at. The back of her head hit its cold surface and she let out a pained yelp.

“Shit… that hurt more than I thought it would,” she groaned.

“Sorry,” Shuichi mumbled. He hovered over her and placed a hand flat against the table’s surface next to her head. He brought his other hand up to her hair, threading his fingers through the strands that adorned the side of her face, his soothing touch his own wordless apology for the unfortunate pain he had sparked in his kiss.

Miu made no move to do anything about their positions, merely enjoying the sensation of his touch. Her eyes at first stared back into his own but her gaze traveled, tracing his boyish features until she stopped at his neck.

“Um… is there something there you’re looking at?”

“Can you take your jacket off?”

Shuichi sputtered a bit in reaction, unable to make a comprehensible sound at first. “Er…”

“D-Don’t look at me like that… I just… Your jacket’s in the way!”

“In the way of  _what_  exactly, Iruma-san?”

Her voice went quiet. “Um… well… Look, it makes it impossible to mark you. You know what that means, right?”

His face became flushed again now that the realization came to him. All he could manage was an, “Okay.”

He eased up off of her and went to work with taking care of the buttons on his jacket. The sound of them unclasping seemed to ring in his ears and he could feel his fingers struggled to keep up the same speed that they had as when he had taken off the first button when he reached the last few, a sort of nervousness overtaking him. He knew he had agreed with her suggestion, but it was still an embarrassing thought. If she wanted to leave one  _there_ , then he couldn’t possibly hide it the next day. It was a surefire sign he had looked for in the infidelity cases he had helped undertake, but usually those that were given one knew to hide it with their long hair or with a scarf: both things he didn’t really have at his disposal here. Still, if she had been so worried about his relationship with Kaede, a relationship that had never gone anywhere, then a mark on him to denote that he was most definitely  _hers_  was worth the trouble he would have to deal with at the next morning’s meal— anything to soothe and comfort her.

Beginning to fold his jacket once it slipped off his body, he was stopped abruptly by a high-pitched whine from his girlfriend that caused him to jump in his skin.

“Y...You really don’t have any kind of class, do you?! What kinda guy takes his sweet time to  _fold_  his clothes when things are getting hot and heavy?!”

...She made a fair point. Embarrassed a bit by himself, he let his jacket fall into a crumpled mess onto the floor. A nagging thought in his mind hoped there wasn’t anything regrettable on the ground of her lab that would stain it, but then again he had various duplicates of his same exact outfit in his closet thanks to a certain monochromatic bear.

“Do you want me to undo the top few buttons of my shirt as well, or…?” he asked.

“No… can I do that?”

He gave her a nod, and she stood up and approached him, working shaky fingers at his clothes to loosen the white collar shirt around him and expose his flesh. She brought her lips towards his neck but hesitated. He felt her hot breath against his throat and fidgeted a bit under her the longer she waited there.

“Um… is there something wrong?”

It seemed him asking was the prodding stick she needed as not a second later did she place her lips and kiss there, soon her kiss becoming a sharp nip and then a suck. He writhed a bit underneath her, but soon enough it was all over. She stepped back a bit, mesmerized by her own creation.

“...How’s it look?” he managed to ask, clearly a little flustered. He had seen various love bites before in his line of work, and he wondered if it showed up as a beautiful red or if he might be able to pass it off as an angry, strange kind of discolored bruise.

A proud hum escaped her lips. “Pretty damn good, if I say so myself!”

“I’m glad,” he smiled. “I’m happy so long as you are.”

Though he had said that, he couldn’t help but notice that Miu was turning shy again judging by her facial expression and posture. It made him quirk an eyebrow. “Um, is something the matter again…?”

“Can… you mark me too?”

The suggestion made his head spin. “If I do that, then…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Everyone’ll know it was us two, but… I mean, why not? Fuck this idea of ‘secret dating’! I got an amazing boyfriend and the world should know it!”

“Even if this world we’re speaking of is just nine people including us?”

“Psshh-shaw, they’re just the first seven people who get to figure out, y’hear me?! We get outta here and we’ll have the loudest dates ever! Hell, your neighbors will hear you screamin’ my name!”

Though the thought of him being that loud because of who knows what she wanted to do to him exactly, assuming she was serious, mortified him, the thought that she wanted to parade him around as her lover held a sentiment that made him feel…  _warm_ . He sincerely hoped that would be the case, that he might be able to make good on his promise to take her out on a date— a  _real_  date without the heightened concern of death looming over their shoulders.

“Alright,” he caved in to her request. With just a glance at her person though, he realized it would be difficult to place a hickey in exactly the same place she had sucked at his skin. With this barrier, he let his thoughts ruminate about a different target as he began to place hesitant kisses along her jawline. He heard her breaths become slightly more audible as he kept working, his kisses gradually lengthening in duration and switching to open mouth ones.

“Sss… Suckha—”

He stopped and placed a finger on her lips. She stared dumbly at him, and he struggled for a few moments to explain why he had done what he had. His voice was low and softer than ever with his plea: “Can you call me something... different now? Try my name.”

She gulped and he wondered if he had overstepped but in a shy whisper, she stammered: “Sh… Shu... “

“...Yes?”

“Shu… ichi…”

His heart skipped a beat. His face eased on a smile, his expression hopelessly pleased and boyish from the result.

“No fair making a face like that,” Miu quietly scolded him.

He buried his face in her hair, his lips barely touching her ear.

“Hn..!”

“I love you, Miu.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck, turning her head to the opposite side in her shyness. “I love you too, you big dummy…”

* * *

The next morning, Shuichi had joined the rest of his companions in the dining hall after the Monokubs’...  _bizarre_  announcement. He had run into Himiko along the way, discussing with her on their short walk of the plot development that was happening between Monotaro and Monophanie.

It clearly seemed as if she had a much more solid grasp of it all alongside her strange investment into the drama, something that had totally flown over his head with each and every segment they were shown.

“Saihara-kun,” K1-B0 had begun, “I can’t help but notice that it looks like something has happened to you.”

It was then that the detective had remembered the love bite that Miu had left him just slightly above where the collar of his jacket was, the redness peeking through for everyone to see if they merely looked at his neck. He knew that the robot had pointed it out mostly out of an oblivious concern, but it still made his face heat up and for him to hang his head low over his breakfast, completely stopping his eating altogether.

Himiko chimed in. “Now that you mention it… I saw that mark on the way here too… but I guess I just ignored it.”

“Is everything alright?” Gonta cried, bringing more and more attention to the blushing detective. “Saihara-kun not hurt?!”

“It’s probably fine,” Maki grumbled from her corner of the table. “It’s not a bruise.”

“Good!” Gonta grinned, easily placated. “Saihara-kun not hurt!”

“I didn’t realize you were the type to do that, Saihara-kun,” Tsumugi said. Though her voice was floaty and her face read nothing with ill intent, all Shuichi could see it as was an accusation. It didn’t surprise him at all that she had been the one to catch on, and he was sure Maki had too but was sparing him out of pity for how the situation was quickly beginning to spiral out of his control. “It must have happened really late at night if you forgot, huh? But isn’t that against the rules if they stay over…?”

“W-Woah!” Kaito’s voice seemed to explode the most of all out of them. “You mean to tell me you actually got some action?! _You?!_ ”

“Er... What kind of action are you speaking of, exactly?” K1-B0 asked.

Kaito began to laugh. “Oh, you know, it’s when—”

“Do you want me to kill you?” Maki cut him off, a glare adorning her face.

“Easy, easy there, Harumaki! I was just answerin’ the guy!”

“Please don’t..,” Shuichi finally spoke for himself. “I think I’ve been embarrassed enough for one morning…”

“I can’t believe someone like you actually got lucky,” Himiko spoke through dreary, elongated words.

It continued to be the subject of conversation, much to the discomfort of Shuichi, but he brought his fingers to lightly touch the mark upon his skin and cast a glance over to Miu. She had managed to hide her own mark much better than him, mostly because he had ended up placing his in a much easier location to obscure with her normal clothing. Regardless, she seemed pleased enough by the flow of discussion, by the sight of what she had left upon him, and even if everyone was misinterpreting Shuichi to have done so much more than he actually had, he couldn’t help but feel happy enough with what euphoria it seemed to bring his lover.

Though he hadn’t had the courage in the end to be able to give enough evidence for their peers to connect the dots between them, he hoped one day he could feel the warmth of her hand in his in a public space— to show them all what beauty he had found.


End file.
